A First Kiss (the Second One) Sealed It

By MARGAUX LASKEY

September 22, 2013

Elizabeth Abigail Gerard, the daughter of Ellen Kelly Gerard and the stepdaughter of Dr. William C. Gerard of Spring Lake, N.J., was married Saturday to Harrison Bradford Piazza, the son of Harold D. Piazza of Glen Ridge, N.J., and the late Elizabeth Obal Piazza. Msgr. John A. Kenneally, the former vicar general of the Diocese of Savannah, performed the ceremony at St. William Catholic Church on St. Simons Island, Ga.

The bride, 26, is an adviser to the Mugrabi family, private art collectors and dealers in New York. Her responsibilities include curating, scouting new artists and consulting on purchases. She graduated cum laude from Villanova and received a master’s in modern and contemporary art from Christie’s Education in New York.

The bride’s stepfather is a dentist in Livingston, N.J., and Toms River, N.J. Her mother owns Sweet Pea, a home furnishings store in Spring Lake.

The groom, 28, is known as Brad. He is the founder of Dashamm Global, a commercial real estate facilitating and expediting company in Jersey City, and is studying for a master’s in real estate from New York University. He graduated from Felician College in Lodi, N.J.

His father retired as associate general counsel in New York for TIAA-CREF, the pension fund. The groom’s mother was an auditor at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. The groom is a stepson of Kathleen Strasser Piazza.

The couple first met in spring 2002 during high school study hall in Glen Ridge. Ms. Gerard was 15, and Mr. Piazza was 17.

Angelica Criscuolo

“She had the biggest brown eyes I’d ever seen,” he said. “There was this draw, this vacuum almost. I couldn’t get drawn elsewhere.”

He asked her out and began a one-month romance. Mr. Piazza said it was “brief and complicated and confusing” but unlike most teenage relationships in that they talked on the phone for hours about poetry, history and French culture and watched old Grace Kelly movies while drinking ginger ale out of champagne flutes.

“I remember it as magic,” she said. “He was very well spoken and very interested in me and also in big dreams, and that was kind of, I don’t know, on a different level than anyone I went to high school with. He was an old soul. I didn’t know what that was until I met him.”

But she was heartbroken when he broke up with her just before he graduated that June.

They saw each other one more time before he went to college, and for a couple of years they called on their birthdays. They soon lost touch, but often thought of each other.

“There was always a ‘what if’ with Lizzie,” Mr. Piazza said. “She was always in the back of my mind.”

In September 2011, Ms. Gerard was crossing the street at 33rd Street and Madison Avenue in New York when she saw Mr. Piazza, as he dashed past her from the opposite direction. He then stopped and turned to her, and both burst out laughing as they began their street corner reunion. Mr. Piazza, out of breath and unable to speak, gently removed Ms. Gerard’s left hand out her blazer pocket. He smiled when he saw there was no ring.

Within a matter of weeks, they both had ended their respective relationships, and their old-fashioned courtship resumed, slowly. Three months later, they had their first kiss, for the second time. MARGAUX LASKEY

Correction: October 13, 2013

A report on Sept. 22 about the marriage of Elizabeth Gerard and Bradford Piazza misstated the relationship between the bride and Dr. William C. Gerard. Although she uses his surname, Dr. Gerard is her stepfather, not her father.